Should you Outsource your Content Marketing, or Keep It In-House?

As the profile of your business improves and your digital marketing efforts become more involved, one thing becomes clear: great content marketing requires ongoing time and effort to produce outstanding results. At the same time, your business is ramping up and you don’t have time to devote the care and precision your content marketing deserves. Do you struggle on trying to do two jobs at once, or outsource this important role to someone else? Here’s what you need to consider when deciding whether to outsource your content marketing or keep it in-house.

Do You Have the Skills?

One of the biggest issues with trying to manage your content marketing yourself is that content marketing is a full-time position. If you’re trying to market your business, chances are you’re already engaged full time in another position. If you try to balance both, one is going to suffer.

While doing your own content marketing may have worked when you were starting out, as your business grows, you need a trained professional to develop and publish the optimized content that will help your business succeed. A professional content marketer has skills in writing, subject knowledge and digital marketing and promotion, which helps ensure your quality content goes further.

Do You Understand Digital Marketing?

Content marketing is part of a bigger marketing umbrella – digital marketing. Your content marketing should fit in and align with your other digital marketing efforts, which may include various front- and back-end marketing optimization practices and constant updates to keep your website outstanding and appealing to visitors and search engines alike. If you don’t have the knowledge or training in digital marketing to really promote your website, outsourcing your content marketing could produce better results than you can alone.

Do You Know What Content Marketing Success Looks Like?

If you don’t have goals and measures to guide your content marketing approaches, your efforts are almost bound to fail. Professional content marketers know what to look for when gauging the success of a content marketing strategy, which might not always be what you expect. If you are not measuring and tracking your content marketing, your investment of time and energy in creating content will be wasted. Outsourcing to a professional produces the greatest return on investment for your content marketing.

Do You Know Who to Target?

Is your content targeting your Facebook fans? Your Twitter followers? While you might be getting lots of likes, are you actually seeing an increase in the high-quality leads you want for your business? One of the most essential yet overlooked steps in content marketing is identifying and targeting your ideal buyer persona. Characterizing this persona and engineering your content to target them takes planning, skill, and time. Outsourcing content development can help you achieve this efficiently and precisely.

Do You Know How to Strategize?

Diving into content marketing with no vision or direction might work at first, but ultimately, it’s going to let your marketing down. It’s not enough to just post regular blogs, social media updates, and update web content. If you can’t step back to get big picture marketing insights because you’re too busy managing the day-to-day execution of your content marketing, now is the time to outsource so you can get better results as your business grows.

While it seems contradictory, outsourcing your content marketing can actually give you more control over your marketing approach and ensure you have the space and clarity of vision to produce outstanding results for your digital marketing strategy.